Michael Smith wrote those lines, and finer songwriting  sturdier, richer, wiser, more mysterious  there has never been. Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Goodman, Suzy Bogguss, Josh White Jr., even the Kingston Trio have all recorded "The Dutchman," but no one sings it quite like Smith. He has lived with the story and melody for so long; he's still in touch with the secrets and sources. "I liked that first line so much," Smith says, "I was so proud of it. I had to trust that I could make up something that would justify it. It was a cop on "Gentle on My Mind,' which was a big hit at the time, and I wanted to extend that rhythm and melody." Smith first recorded "The Dutchman" in 1986, long after others had already made it classic. His voice  deep, slow, enveloping every syllable with sympathy and wonder  creates that uncanny sense of a human soul coming to life, with a soul's unfathomable emotional history, right there before your ears, even your eyes, and the song is so real it seems you can touch it.

Michael Smith's music can do that, but he's still relatively unknown (just to clarify: That contemporary-Christian singer and he share nothing but a name), even among ardent fans of singer/songwriters. Smith grew up in the Beat era and came of age musically in the '60s coffeehouse culture, playing the same venues as Eric Andersen in New York and Joni Mitchell in Florida, writing mythic ballads like "Spoon River" and "Bird Avenue" and curious satirical larks like "Dead Egyptian Blues" and "The Vegematic Song" (covered memorably by Steve Goodman), and if he's too well respected among peers to be called obscure, it wasn't until the late '80s that he began making records worthy of his songs.

"I'm only now a really industrious person," Smith says. "I let my art drift, and I'm only now trying to write songs on a constant basis. I had a period of time, between the age of 40-46, where I had a regular job and had stopped doing music. I got the opportunity to do the music for The Grapes of Wrath with Steppenwolf, the local theater company who had these heavy people  John Malkovich, John Mahoney. Things like that are rather constantly happening here in Chicago. That's why I stay here. If I moved to Detroit I'd be working lounges, which is what I did when I lived there. There was one folk room, which you'd get to play once a year if you were lucky, and if you were local then it was much less likely you'd work there. But in the '60s, the field of acoustic music wasn't as populated as it is now. That's the field to be in these days, much more so than it was. Maybe this is the complaint of anybody who gets older in the business, but there are a lot of young people around who seem to do what you do but cheaper and with, let's say, more youth. But when I first started working in coffeehouses, you'd get booked for a week at a time, and they'd be open six days a week, or you'd get booked for a month at a time and they'd still be open for six days a week."

Smith has spent the last 20 years in Chicago; during that time he has developed a close friendship with Anne Hills (who once recorded an entire album of Smith songs and with whom he frequently tours), composed frequently for and within the theater community  producing a kind of musical memoir for stage called Michael, Margaret, Pat, and Kate  but his records still appear with the frequency of comets, and burn the same way. After a second album for Flying Fish, Love Stories (1987), four years passed before Time, an intensely personal seance conjured only through voice and guitar. With the exception of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, Another Side of Bob Dylan and perhaps Leo Kottke's Green House, no album has more fully revealed just what kind of art can happen when all else is stripped away.

"There was a time when that's what you did when you recorded," Smith says. "Judy Collins did that: She maybe had two guitars and a bass player. Joan Baez used to come out with records that just had a guitar. It was like a big deal when she had a second guitar player on her second album. And I'm also thinking of the first Joni Mitchell album, which was just her and her guitar and piano. It was like, this is what I can do left to myself. It's much more personal because you haven't brought in a bass player who's played on a bunch of other records." And instead of sounding thin and primitive, Time is intricate and out-of-time, like "a hex sign on a barn," as Smith sings in "This Here Mandolin." "My picture was that there would be a lot of air," he says, "a lot of spaces between the notes."